


... and the world is so hot

by writingtoomuchfanfiction



Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell, Simon Snow series - Gemma T. Leslie
Genre: Agatha isn't a bad person, Angst, Baz's mental health is terrible, First Time, M/M, Maybe - Freeform, POV First Person, Post-Canon, Swearing, Triggers, Werewolf Attacks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-04-29 01:53:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 17,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5111981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingtoomuchfanfiction/pseuds/writingtoomuchfanfiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're not students anymore.<br/>This isn't an exam.<br/>No one is coming to help.<br/>Failing is dying. </p><p>desperate, disastrous love in a desperate disastrous world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. early to bed, early to rise

\------

               Penny is used to seeing Baz in the kitchen when she wanders in in the morning, still in blue-striped pyjamas and with her hair tied into a loose bun. This time he’s draped across the couch, all sharp edges and pale skin and dark hair over his eyes. It always sets her on edge, though- the casual way he sneaks into the apartment she and Simon share. It means that someone else could, too, while they were asleep. “I thought you had class.”  
                “I thought you had a better security system,” he counters before he even opens his eyes, or pushes the hair out of his face. He’s dressed in black- black pants, black shirt, black boots- but has a deep violet buttoned shirt over his undershirt that contrasts so much she has to stop for a minute, questions forming in her mind. He looks sideways at her. “Go wake up the Chosen One.” Baz swings his legs to the side and stands, moving towards the fridge.

                It’s the acrid scent of smoke filling the apartment that wakes me up before Penelope has a chance. I leap to my feet, cursing when the sheets catch my ankles and I nearly fall flat on my face. Penelope shrieks when she smells it, too. “Baz! Where’s my wand where’s my wand-” by the time I get to the kitchen, she’s sprinting for her bedroom.  
               Baz is here! The thought sends electricity through my heart- vampires are flammable, there is fire in the apartment and- I grab the extinguisher from the wall and hear Baz trying to spell the fire down, but he isn’t focusing enough. The center of the smoke is a glow on the stove. I yank the pin from the extinguisher, aim, and pull the trigger, white foam filling the area around the stove. Baz coughs in the background, but as the smoke disperses, he’s laughing. “You could’ve been killed, Baz, what were you doing?”  
             The damned vampire is still laughing. My face heats up, my ears burning. Powder now covers the stove and countertop, and Penelope rushes in with her wand. I swear her face falls when she realizes she’s lost the opportunity to spell the fire away. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” she mutters, and the smoke and powder clear, the dishes by the sink sparkling for good measure.  
              “Pancakes,” Baz admitted. I could kill him. Six in the morning and he nearly kills himself making pancakes. He’s flexing his wrist experimentally. “Your stove was on. There was gas.”  
               “You could’ve checked!” It’s a weak proposal. He wouldn’t know, he cooks with fire. He does everything with fire. Even his gaze still feels like fire on my skin when he looks over at me. “I’ll cook.” Penny had removed the tail- finally found a way to do it- but she hadn’t removed the wings. The tail was just a balance, a piece to a set- but I’d poured my magick into the wings, and they wouldn’t be removed. They hang at my back- I had cut slits into the backs of the shirts I slept in- getting in the way.  
               I open the fridge and peer in, grabbing out orange juice, eggs. The pan on the stove was melted, repaired and cleaned but without the same shape. “Is that a new spell? Why not just an as you were?” We have one more pan that I put on the stove, moving the other one to the counter and flicking on the gas again, lighting the burner that I set the pan on. Cooking is something… I’m learning to do. Most of the time, it’s terrible.  
             

             There’s hot breath on my ear and I almost drop the eggshells- but it’s Baz. I can’t even yell at him for sneaking up on me because I can’t think, damn him. “I would have eliminated the fire, Snow,” he says, and then leans away against the wall, watching me. Eliminated. Like it was some kind of opponent, not the object of his fucking pyromaniac fascination. “You just can’t resist the chance to be the savior.”  
             This time, I’m the laughing one. He had spoken so coolly, like this was a dark secret he’d shared and I lose it. He raises an eyebrow and Penny, behind me, bursts into laughter, too. “It’s breakfast, Baz. It’s breakfast and Penny tried a new spell and you nearly set us on fire before eight.”  
             “It should’ve worked, those are magick words if I’ve heard any. I do study,” Penelope interrupts defensively. I shrug. Of course she studies, she’s Penny. She has the self control of a machine, whereas I’m more often compared to a ticking bomb. “Are you going to class, Simon?”  
             “It’s not all day, but I’m doing the meeting with my therapist today, too.” I wince. “Can you do the groceries?” She sighs, but doesn’t snap at me, so I take it as positive. I can take all the positivity I can get after saving my kitchen and its occupants from fiery death (again). “Are you coming back today, Baz?”  
             “No,” he responds curtly, and there’s something in his voice I can’t place, but when I attempt to catch his eye, he looks away. “I was joining you for breakfast, but as that’s a hopeless cause, I’ll be leaving.” He waves dismissively. “Make like a tree,” he says, and he’s gone. Did he teleport? I can’t imagine that’d work for anything but short distances, but he can’t stand not making a dramatic exit.  
           “You’ll be- wait!” Penny starts, but she’s cut off by his departure. She glares at me, as if I have the answer, but I’m remembering that he’d been living with Normals and has used stoves before- so why’d he forget he’d turned on the gas? It’s unusual for Baz to be dangerously scatterbrained- that’s my sort of thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please excuse any mistakes or glitches, i don't have a beta as of yet and this is my first time writing in first-person POV!


	2. late to bed, late to rise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this scene is very nsfw, do be cautious-!

Simon

               I wake up when he comes in. He smells like smoke- he always smells like smoke. I curl tighter on the bed in the apartment, just slightly, so he doesn't know I'm awake. I can hear his breathing and his footsteps in the dark room, I can hear him pacing. He doesn't change, I can hear him slide his pants and his shirt off and roll into bed, not caring. Picturing him stretched out on the other side of the bed, awake, staring at the ceiling- I can't fall back asleep. "...Baz?"

               I roll over onto my other side to face him, pulling the blankets away from me so I can reach a hand out to touch his shoulder. He startles. "Snow. You're awake," he responded, an observation. As if him lying in the dark, barely dressed in the middle of the night is an average occurrence. I'm scared to touch him, so I pull my hand away. I can't trust myself not to move it somewhere else.

             The sheets under him rustle against his skin as he turns slightly, and I wish the lights were on because I can feel my skin burning under his night vision and all I have are the sounds of him. "You don't live here," I remind him. It's cold without the blankets. I shiver, remembering that all I'm wearing are the loose pyjama pants Penny bought in the wrong size because I didn't want to go to the clothing store. I move to pull them up farther on my hips, and then decide not to- anything to make Baz flustered. As my thoughts turn to that subject, I have to bite the inside of my cheek to end that line of intent because there is a flush rising to my cheeks. "You usually wear more to sleep in," I mutter, not even realizing I'd said it aloud until too late.

         "I was running," he returns. He moves closer, and he's fucking taunting me now, his breath hot on my neck and for someone so flammable he plays with fire across my senses like an inferno. The scent of sweat should be off-putting but on him it's irresistable. There's only inches between us. "...Is that a problem, Snow?"

           I close the distance. I have to, because he's there and I never paid attention to logic anyways, and his lips are chapped and soft at the same time and my tongue may not create magick spells anymore but when I run it over his ear he goes rigid as if transfixed.

           "I can't believe you just called me Snow," I whisper. "Can I move my hands?"

 

Baz

          He asks me if he can move his hands. I find that I don't even care because all I can think of is those loose pants and the almost unnoticeable trail of brown hair starting just above his hips. Almost unnoticeable. "I don't care what you do," I growl, and then his teeth are on my neck- rounded teeth, not the fangs that are elongating in my mouth- and although the war is behind us, Simon Snow will be the death of me.

         I lean forward to kiss his collarbone, gently, because reminding myself that this is something to protect is the only way that I can suppress the urge to sink my teeth into his neck. He's exposing every dangerous side of me, teasing the vulnerable pieces of my skin, my neck, my stomach as his fingers dance across my torso. I let my hand linger on his chest for a moment, and when he doesn't call me off, I shift and allow both hands to wander over the exposed skin.

       Simon moves and then his kiss lands on my chest and I thought only women could be sensitive there and I was so fucking wrong. "Baz? Is this- is this okay?" he asks, and I can't believe he'd ask that with his breath against my chest.

           "You talk too much, Sthimon," I rasp, and my fangs are in the way of my speech because my control is unraveling. He is undoing me and I am powerless to stop him. I don't want to stop him. My fingers are curling around the edge of his pyjama bottoms and his intake of breath is more satisfying than any high I could get from blood, or maybe it's because his blood is already mine, he is already mine. "How far are you taking thisth?" I ask, and it's a challenge, and I pull him closer by the elastic of his waistband and the change in his breath could render me unconscious.

          I don't know how much longer I can keep up this facade. This idiot is taking my control and I don't even want it back, if he moved he'd feel how hard I am, how I can barely think beyond the taste of his lips.

 

Simon

          All those years I was wondering how I could ever cause Baz even the least bit of discomfort, and all it takes to bring him down is a kiss. He's been a hopeless romantic the whole time, and I can't help the satisfaction of hearing his fangs in his voice, knowing how out of his element he is. When he pulls me forward by my waistband I swear his breath hitched in his throat. I drag my tongue across his chest. "Farther," is all I manage to answer him. 

         I don't know what I want. I just want farther. I twist upwards to kiss him, but in the dark my hands can't find all of him, stumbling along his skin, his legs, his ribcage. He takes my hands, winds our fingers together, squeezes tight. I kiss him again, on the neck. He slowly separates our fingers and holds my hands by the wrists. I don't understand until he moves them, guides my hands and lets go when the brush against the waistband of the only clothing he's still wearing.

          My heart will not slow down. It beats like a drum, increasing into a crescendo as his hand slips under the material of my pants. His hand is cold and yet lights a fire under everywhere it touches until he dips lower and despite myself I gasp at the sensation, at the energy flooding my veins. I never thought I needed this but I do, and my therapist was wrong about my sexuality because it does matter, it matters so much and I am so fucking gay. My hands stay anchored to his waistband for a moment, and then I slide down on the bed. I'm out of reach now and he has to pull his hands back, but now his hips are at eye level and when I drag the cloth away, down over his knees, I hear the hiss through his teeth. Here. This is where I want him, breathless, rigid.

           I've never done this before, but then, I don't care now. Baz will judge me anywhere else but here is messy and raw and he's just as new as I am and somehow that's comforting. When I kiss the tip of his erection, his hips twitch and suddenly he pushes himself farther into my throat and I'd be annoyed if it weren't for the sounds he made, sounds that I couldn't ever imagine someone like Basilton Pitch making. Instead of pulling away, I remember how to use my tongue.

 

Baz

          I can barely think. Nothing has felt like this. Like losing control so completely and so willingly. I'd let him do this, let him unwind me and unravel me all night except that I have waited so many years to touch him and I'll be damned if the stammering idiot takes the chance away from me. I pull out of his mouth and it takes every ounce of self control I have when I drag him up towards me not to bite him. I'm shaking with the impulse, but I have so many impulses and there's so many things I want to do to him that I just kiss him, crash against him, stop trying to think about it. Breathe.

          He says my name when I break away for a breath. It feels like a spell. My lips brush against his neck. He tenses immediately, and I can smell the fear, but I have to prove this to him. I kiss where his veins are and move towards his jaw, sucking at the spot just below his ear that makes him shiver. I can smell something else on him now, sweat-hunger-passion. Neither of us are speaking because there's no room for words. He is filling me up with his gasps and his kisses and I have my hands wrapped around his pants, pulling them down and tugging them off. My hand curls around his dick and he groans, a deep sound that can't have come out of him, of all people. His breath is ragged, but now I have the upper hand, now I have Simon Snow at my fingertips.

            I run my other hand over his chest, mapping his skin. Remembering it.

 

Simon

              I have never understood calling an attractive person hot. I understand now. Baz is hot- he is fire, his very touch is blazing. He lights up the whole room, although I cannot see a thing. I can feel it. I feel as if I'm going to go off, light the whole room ablaze, and I half expect smoke to be coming off of my skin. He is kissing my neck and I forget everything I thought I knew about vampires. I hope he leaves a mark. I am past rationality. It isn't as if I haven't jerked off before- I can't imagine how I ever thought it would be the same feeling as having Baz here, I can't tell if he's on top of me or next to me or under me, he's just here, tangled up and playing me like an instrument.

              I reorient myself. He's beside me and I sit up, wrap my leg around his so that I'm over him, using my hands to find his face and his chest. His hand is still curled around my erection and my breath is short, fast, I can't slow it down because I am barely in control. When I pitch forward at a tugging sensation my hips grind down into his and his back arches, and I can't get past how fucking beautiful he looks with his head back and his hair spread across the sheets, finally at my mercy, finally mine after a race I hadn't known I had been running. He was always better with fire, and he is fire now, I swear my bed will begin to smolder. His hips lifted to align with mine and he's hard and fast and beautiful beneath me, my thoughts race faster than I can control and I can't think.

 

Baz

             I never intended this, whatever he would say afterwards. Somehow, Snow keeps fucking up my plans, every time, but I can't stay upset with him because he's intoxicating. I touch everything I can, his face, his hair, his arse, his fragile ribcage, his hips that don't stop moving and I settle there, pulling him into me harder. I am addicted to him. His breath is getting faster and his movements more desperate- of course he'd give out first- and I tangle my hands in his hair, thrusting upwards into him until he crumples forward and warm liquid is over my stomach and I barely move my hand up in time to muffle his outcry because if we wake Bunce she'll kill us both.

             Simon falls onto me like an exhausted heap. "I couldn't hold out," he tells me, and I think he's apologizing, the idiot. He sounds... genuinely upset. I'm unsurprised. I push back the endless need to bite him and disentangle my hands, stroking his hair and kissing his damp forehead. I'll never grow tired of kissing him. "It'sth not your fault. Calm down, Thnow, get it together," but my words are rasped between fangs and there's an edge to my voice I can't hide.

           I can see him, but I close my eyes when he shifts down. The sound I make when he wraps his mouth around my dick as if he's done it a thousand times is embarassing, but I'm behond that. Nothing can be humiliating here. Nothing could ever feel wrong. I can feel it coiling in my core. I choke out a warning like a gentleman, but fuck, I can't even think and I think I said his name but it may have just been in my head, which was filled with his name, and this feeling, Simon painted all over my consciousness.

 

Simon

              Baz is sticky and it's at least partially my fault, and I don't know what to do so I fetch a towel from the bathroom. He opens his eyes when I pull the towel over him, watching me without speaking until I throw the towel to the side and sit next to him. I trace his skin and his face, feeling his eyelids flutter under my touch. I think I'm entitled to touch him, now, to trace his skin and his scars and his muscles, because we crossed a line we can't uncross and I wouldn't want to, anyway. He still doesn't speak. I get nervous.

           "Baz? Was this all a mistake?" I freeze with my hand splayed flat across his chest and I feel the laugh before I hear it. There's a rustle- he's shaking his head.

          "You look like the fucking sun, Simon, your hair's everywhere. Come here." I melt down into his arms, shamelessly, because it's in the middle of the night and no one can see me curled up into him, head resting on his chest. His hand, toweled off and as clean as it will be until he showers, touches my back almost tentatively, as if after all, he's still nervous. This is the side I rarely see of him. This is the softness, the mild protectiveness as he begins to rub small circles into my back. "You look best," he breathes, "...with no clothes." I shiver. I don't know what he looks like with no clothes on. I want to, but I'm tired, the world is slipping away.

           Tomorrow morning, then... tomorrow morning, because I still don't know why he came to me in the middle of the night- what could have scared him so badly he ran to his boyfriend's apartment to hide.


	3. look both ways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All Baz wants is to protect Simon.   
> All Simon wants is to understand Baz.

Baz

         I wake up to the smell of smoke and Simon curled up half on top of me. I’ve wanted to wake up like this for years, moving my hand to entangle my fingers in the softness of his hair. It’s tempting to kiss him awake, but it’s early in the morning and his eyes are resting closed.

         Simon Snow, the only person I could ever watch like this for hours and be perfectly content. His hair curls under my fingertips, and I fall into the warm delusion that it can be this, this moment, for hours, nowhere either of us have to be. No one that needs saving. He doesn’t have the same fire when he’s asleep, but I haven’t had enough blood for the energy I’m spending and I’m cold. His skin radiates heat in comparison.

        It would be so easy to lay here and fall asleep again to the feel of his heartbeat aligned with mine, or wake him up and kiss every mole until he knew how pathetically obsessed I am, but everything is different. We’re not a team, not partners in crime, not united against a common foe. We’re not searching for the Humdrum again. He needs to rest. He needs to learn how to be a person instead of a hero. I need to learn how to be alone, how to work _alone_ without looking over my shoulder for fucking _numpties_ or thinking every shadow is a dark mage waiting to strike.

       I detach him gently. I don’t want to wake him up. I don’t want him to see that the tips of my fangs are already showing. I haven’t had my fill of blood in two weeks, just enough to keep me alive. What I did last night could have turned him for all I knew and I didn’t stop- Merlin, I don’t think I’d be able to stop. I can’t risk that.

        Simon’s necklace is discarded in a small box on his bureau. I pick up my shirt and use it to handle the cross, setting it down on his nightstand. There’s a pad of paper and a pen on his desk- I scrawl a note across it and leave it next to the necklace, telling him to wear it- and keep it on until I tell him otherwise.

         I run a hand through my hair- I need a shower. A cold shower, no matter how cold I am already. Cold showers put me through years of Snow sleeping shirtless, they’ll put me through a day of him sleeping naked. I dress as quietly as possible. I know where to find showers that can take the scent off of me. I’m better at hiding than Simon- but then, he has red wings curling around his back. All I have is a widow’s peak and a tendency to light fires.

        I button my shirt and stand by the door for a moment, watching him. I finally had what I had been chasing for so long, and we’d ended a deadly conflict at the expense of his magick- and here I am, on another chase.

 

Simon

          Memory starts to return before I open my eyes. It’s colder than it was last night- it takes me a minute to understand why. Baz is gone. My eyes open wider, staring at the empty space where he should have been- I yawn and sit up and, while doing so, I notice the note. My necklace is sitting on top of it, but I take the note first, reading down it with an increasing frown. What is he doing? Neither of us have class today. I haven’t put on the cross in a long time, and didn’t last night prove he could control himself? That he’s more than his vampirism?

         It feels heavier around my neck than it ever did before. I can’t believe he’d leave- no, I can believe that he’d leave after sleeping with me. I’d just rather not. The sun is just rising and light coming through the window illuminates the room, a sheet tangled around my waist. I drop my head into my hands, rubbing the drowsiness out of my eyes. Was it a mistake? I don’t know. I can’t even answer that.

         There’s a knock at the door and I grab another blanket and throw it over me just as Penny bursts in, crossing her arms over her chest. She’s still in pyjamas and her hair is down, as if she’d just woken up. Her expression changes when she sees the look on my face. “What happened to you?” She holds up her hands. “It’s a rhetorical question. Thin walls.”

         “Oh sh- I’m sorry, Penny,” I apologize, my face heating up. “I forgot your room is next to mine. Have you seen him? He was gone when I woke up.”

         “He left? Baz is crazy over you, he wouldn’t leave before you’d woken up.” Penny bites the inside of her cheek and then her hands drop and she sighs. I’m wide awake now, putting the pieces of the dark puzzle together in my mind. Baz doesn’t trust himself after last night, even though he never hurt me. He’s not scared of me- he hasn’t been scared of me since we fought the Humdrum. He’s scared of something else, then. “Why are you wearing that? Won’t it burn him?”

        “He told me to wear it. Left a note. Didn’t say anything else, of course, it’s not like he’d say anything useful,” I reply sarcastically. “What are we supposed to do? Follow him? I don’t have any magick to use.” Baz’s habits have always been odd to me, but I shiver when I remember how pale he’d looked yesterday. Come to think of it, he hasn’t had any blood from the butcher in a while, and we haven’t asked. “I’ll call you if he comes back here while you’re out, and you do the same, and we’ll talk to him. Okay?”

        Penny shrugs and turns around. “Take a shower and put some clothes on, I want to follow him.” She closes the door behind her and I stare incredulously after her. Does anything I say make a difference? Why is she so worried about Baz waking up early? Where the hell is my boyfriend?


	4. my soul to take

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon is angry, Baz is furious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning- claustrophobia.

Simon

 

         Penny looks over at me again on the train line. She keeps doing that- I feel like a beetle in the jar of an overly curious fifth grader. “Are you sure you’re okay, Simon?” she asks me again. Am I okay? It’s Baz who’s missing, it’s him who could be in serious danger- but that he would walk out after his first time, my first time, it’s unbelievable. Baz wouldn’t do that. Then again, it wasn’t like Baz to crawl into bed in the middle of the night, either. “We’re almost in London proper. If he’s going to go anywhere, it’s here.”

       “And after that? This was a terrible idea,” I snap irritably. “We can’t ask Normal police. Is there a spell for finding people? You have to know something.” She always knows something- or she should. I hate snapping at her. It isn’t her fault, none of this is. Even the clatter of the train on the tracks pisses me off. What Baz and I have is fragile, and I’m determined to protect it with everything I have in me. My breath shakes as fast as my knee does. There’s hundreds of ways an interaction with Baz today could go, and every one of them adds an extra beat to my racing pulse. “Do you think he wants to be found?”

       “Maybe." Penny wipes a hand over her face tiredly. She didn’t sleep last night- I had forgotten. “What if Baz learned how to shield himself from it?” She looks pitying again, and I resist the urge to make a face. It feels, sometimes, that with my magik, my dignity vanished. I grew up with Normal peers- I know how to live without it, but does Penny? She’s more fascinated by technology than anything else. “Simon, we don’t know anything about him. Anything useful, anyway. Might as well track him using magik, then we can follow him. Merlin, we’ve been following him since first year.”

        “Stalking a vampire through London. I think I’ve read that,” I comment. “We’re almost to Paddington, come on. The clock ticks.”

 

Baz

        Vampires are supposedly creatures of the night, but I have to sit down for an hour outside the entrance to the Underground before I can climb down the steps. It doesn’t matter how many floors Covent Garden station is, I take the stairs. There’s a clinging copper tang to the walls. I was right- they’ve been here. I’ve been half-starved for two weeks, I can smell blood anywhere. The walls are nauseatingly thick with it.

         The clinic I’d broken into had pale blue hospital clothing, but at least they were clean, and they smelled of nothing but clinical disinfectant. I’d showered as much as possible, but even in all the blood-scent I can feel his skin, hear his voice. The lights in the stairwell flicker as I reach the thirteenth floor below the street. I shouldn’t use magik yet. My skin tingles with discomfort, the dark clouding around the corners of my vision and choking out my breath.

         The walls don’t breathe, they exhale, I’m falling down a hole crackling with electric terror. Razor-blade murk in poisoned lungs, clinical clothing on a criminal monster. Crowley, I haven’t felt this way in so long I flicker between stepping through the hidden door and running up the hundreds of steps to safety.

         My eyes narrow in the gloom. I reach back for sanity. Snow’s hands in my hair, ice-blue eyes and rose-flushed cheeks, golden hair and dazed concern- and I realize what possessed me to go to his flat instead of mine. I needed something to hang on to while I break all of my promises to Fiona. I slip through the concrete wall and into the dark.

 

        There’ll be pairs of eyes on me from all directions- I can see those. I’m more worried about the noses and ears. “I don’t care that you exist.” I try to speak calmly. Remember that I’m a born killer, too- to them, a monster, but there’s been six questionable vanishings in the last month and they were clustered too worryingly around the wrong moon. “I just want to find those kids.”

         My heart thuds. They don’t know anything about me. They can’t smell me, my home, my history, where I’m from or where I’m going… but they can tell a hell of a lot more than I can. “None of us would kill a child,” someone snarled back, aggression tearing into my sense of danger and wreaking havoc with my focus. Damnit, why can’t I just walk out of here? I laugh at Snow for his Chosen One complex, and then walk into a gang of dark creatures. “Unlike yours, vampire. Did you think your race could be scrubbed off?”

 _Yes_ , I want to shout. Yes, or rather, I hope so. I hope that I can fix everything any vampire has ever done until my father will talk about it to my face or I can eat at a café. My every action is an apology for something I never did (because I’m disturbed- ask anyone). I have the opportunity to leave, and I can hear Fiona and Snow and Bunce and even Wellbelove, who doesn’t have an opinion about any of us anymore, telling me to take it. Instead, I breathe through darkness- can one breathe when it’s dark? Dark air seems emptied of all oxygen, different, starved. The man said the kids had been fucking killed- _what do I do, Fiona? Walk away?_ “How were they killed?”

        “You’re playing with fire, boy, and you’re the only thing flammable around here.” The words were meant to threaten, but I’m tired of being a bystander. I was a villain, set against a hero, and now he’s lost his golden-boy reputation and I’ve lost my power. Snow is at most a lover, not a character foil, and I have a will of my own. “This isn’t a friendly neighborhood. Ask questions and you’re killed.”

         “You know who hurt them.” There’s a reason children may be taken at new moon. If they’re not already dead, they’re dying, and who’s going to stop them- Snow? He’s just recovering, waking up with nightmares that Penny calls me about at all hours of the night, he still tries spells when he forgets where his magik’s gone and falls into dark, angry moods when he remembers. Bunce needs to protect him, the Pitch family would lock me inside until I stopped being reckless, as if I hadn’t been raised half my life to kill or be killed.

        Silence falls around the room. I can’t tell how large it is- the walls feel closer every time I breathe. Simon’s freckles are a distant memory, and starving in a black cage is all that springs to me defenses. Adrenaline pulses like a war drum. My senses are confused. I find rage, because I’m Tyrannus Basilton fucking Pitch and fear is for people who are kidnapped by fucking numpties. “Are you going to let them take your families, you bastards? Do you lose your hearts with your humanity?”

        “You know nothing about us!” The man shouted. I catch his arm in midair but I’m unprepared for when it turns into a claw and I fall backwards through the entrance, spells beaten out by the bitter darkness. If I lose blood I’ll die, but he’d know that, he knows everything. I’m a bloody fool with a death wish walking into rat traps, and the trap was just sprung. There is not enough hatred in the world, even the Humdrum couldn’t summon the explosive rage of realizing that kids had been reduced to bait. I grab his next fist, but it drives through until it turns into claws and connects with my arm. 

        Blood scatters the dust around me. No one uses this staircase. No one to see me. I bite through my own tongue when claws sink into my shoulder, and I’m fighting a man and a wolf at the same time, I’m fighting against three times my weight. I throw him off and his claws dig deeper into my skin, anchoring him for a slash across my torso, tearing the papery fabric of my clothes. Crimson spreads out along the blue like flower petals. I choke. How dare he, this stranger, tear apart a Pitch, how dare the lights flicker, leaving me breathless and disoriented. Where is Snow’s galaxies and stars, his supernova clouds and sunray hair? I told him off, and that’s why he’s safe, tucked away in his flat with Bunce where he can’t be extinguished again.  

         He’s already attacked me. It’s an advantage if you know the spell, if you’re reckless enough not to think clearly. “ **Fight fire with fire,** ” I counter at a growl, the roar of flames bursting to life as my hands are freed to let loose the magik, watching the rolling blaze drive him back into his den.

        I catch a glimpse of his unshaven face before he disappears, a smirk, because all the fire in the world won’t close the gashes that tore open my chest. The fire slows. My heart refuses to slow with it, and my senses won’t slow down. I’ll go out with a bang, as Snow’s magik did, if I lose blood this quickly. Golden curls. Sky eyes. Soft sheets. Warm coffee. I close sweat-laden eyelids and imagine this is just a burnt tongue, not blood bubbling up beyond my skin. I breathe. Bloody werewolves.

 

 

 


	5. thicker than water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Simon and Penny have found Baz, but in time?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a lot of Penny POV in this chapter! Tw- blood and Baz
> 
> *fixed the confusion- Penny has a ring, not a wand!

Penelope

      I cast more than a few spells, and end up asking Normal policemen. They’re kind, and straightforward- far from the cryptic messages of literally anyone at Watford or, as far as I’ve been able to tell, anyone in the world of magik. The comments end at Covent Garden Station. “Pale, blue pyjamas?” a copper suggests.

       I share a skeptical look with Simon. Pyjamas? Then again, it’s Pitch, and not the one that I’d been growing used to. This was someone who slept with Simon and then left before he woke up instead of obsessing for weeks over some new freckle he’d discovered. The policewoman gestures towards her hair in a mimicry of a widow’s peak- pyjamas or not, it’s Baz. “He sat down on the stairs and wouldn’t move for anything for a while. Offered to take him down to a station, but he wouldn’t budge. Friend of yours?”

        I don’t like this. Baz was scared before he went down those steps. Simon’s scared already. “You could say that,” I reply. I elbow Simon in his side to say something, an apology, but he’s still staring at her as if he can’t believe Baz would do anything stupid on his own. Neither of them can ever believe it, even when their recklessness gets them injured over and over. I’s all the boys ever seem to do, isn’t it? Yet it was a hunch that brought me here, an instinct that all was not well with Baz and he wouldn’t ask for help. Even if he needed it. I follow hunches, they're usually spot on. I swallow. “We should go and check on him, then. Thank you for your help, come on, Simon.”

 

Simon

            I can smell the blood before I can see it.

           Concrete and metal and rust. Baz is afraid of the dark, a vampire afraid of the dark- a vampire afraid of drinking too much blood, and I am descending the steps so fast that my muscles forget that I need oxygen.

           Blood and darkness and Penny holding a ball of light in her hands, the flickering of the stairwell. I remember how quick to danger he is, his death wish in our last year at Watford, and my heart is going to burst free of its cage soon and I don’t think I’ll notice.

          My ankle twists on one of the steps and I tumble down, grabbing the railing, pulling myself up. The fucking Chosen One and I can’t run. I use the shame. I use the anger. I use my confusion and the next flight of steps is slick. I want to throw up when I look down and my foot is slipping on dark red, I can’t breathe. “Penny!” I yell, “Fuck- fuck- _Penny_!”

         It’s him. I’d know Baz anywhere, in any clothes, in any world, at any age. I could cross every universe we saw that day at Watford and I’d still find him, but- too late- I fall beside him on my knees, and I think he’s dead, but blood is still bubbling weakly from his chest. “Christ,” I mumble, and it’s someone else, someone better than I ever could be, who's moving. A different Simon Snow. I’m frozen and this other Simon is screaming and trying to stop the blood. I wonder why he’s shouting.

           Penny grabs me and shoves me to the side and he’s red, his chest is red his shoulder is red the floor is red my hands are red, the whole world is dyed dark crimson and I swear my vision is black and white.

          I’m a video montage of hands on wounds and torn-up shirts, someone is still yelling and it sounds like my voice. There’s Baz dying and Penny trying to save him and everything else is grey, nothing else matters enough to be touched by light but his closed eyes.

 

Penelope

        Simon won’t stop screaming. I cast half a dozen spells and I know they can’t hear us at the top of the stairwell but I’ve sealed off our help, too- no one is coming to help us. To help him. I push Simon away from Baz because he doesn’t know what he’s doing and for a moment, I’ve already lost both of them. Stupid fucking Baz. Stupid fucking Simon. Stupid fucking world. I grab Simon’s shirt, I don’t remember when he took it off or when I pulled my sweatshirt off but I don’t have time to ask. I rip apart the soaked material of Baz’s shirt, a flimsy buttoned thing that was hiding the gashes across his stomach. There’s no acid, nothing but blood, and darker and darker every minute.

        I press the shirt into the injury, and I can’t remember my spells. I can’t forget this now. This isn’t an exam, I’m not a student anymore, this cocky bastard is dying. “Stay with me, Baz,” and it’s pleading more than reassuring, my hands are covered in blood and my ring is lost in it. I can think of a spell, but it won’t work- not for me, I’m not the silver lifeline, not the anchor that he needs- but Simon’s magik is gone. And Simon is, too, or at the least, his mind is, he’s somewhere I can’t find and I know he’s reaching for what he doesn’t have.

       I grab his shoulder with one hand, keeping one pressed to the open wound. My fingers leave crimson dripping from Simon’s skin. “ **In sickness and in health,** ” I say, and _**push**_. Simon stops screaming as if he’s run out of energy all at once, his fatigue is a shadow on his face. I don’t know where the magik is coming from but it hits him like a wall and it doesn’t matter how I did it, it doesn’t matter that it’s burning Simon’s arm as it had mine when he’d first pushed magik into me, and it’s the same link- as if a chain’s been relinked.

          I am breathless and my hair is everywhere, I’m blood-soaked and sweating and shivering and the blood slows to a trickle in Baz’s chest and his shoulder, the deep bruises across his frame lessening to purple-black paint splash marks. I did it- I did it because I couldn’t, and I had to, and I don’t know why it worked because they’re not married but I’ve never understood anything about them. Baz’s eyes flutter, paper-moth dust beating its wings in his eyelids. There’s so much blood and he’s more pale than he’s ever been, a ghost, his eyes thin slivers of glazed confusion slipping shut. “Baz fucking Pitch, don’t you dare,” I snap, and his eyes struggle half-open again. “Simon’s here, we followed you. Can you talk? Please say something,” I repeat it, and I deserve friends, I deserve friends who are alive and I don’t have many now and I need to know that he’s not going to leave. I need him here, as desperately as Simon, but more quietly.

 

Baz

       I was cold, and then burning hot. Bunce is staring at me with a wildness I hadn’t even seen in the werewolves, and she’s covered in blood- my blood- some of which must be from biting my tongue. They’ll turn if it gets anywhere near their veins. I don’t have the energy to choke out a warning, keeping my eyes open is taking all of the energy that I have.

      My skin is tingling where her hand is- there’s a spell on me, and I’m dimly aware of it fading away. With it goes the focus that I’d had, and my vision blurs into itself again. She’s saying something to me, but my ears are ringing and I hear garbled sounds as if I’m underwater, drifting halfway between the surface and the dark depths below me. I do my best to produce sound, a whisper that tears along my vocal chords, “I’ll explain,” I rasp, the words weak and rough, as if tarnished by my earlier lies.

      Simon’s here. I can smell the apple-scent of his hair underneath the blood and metal, and I wouldn’t mind dying here, with them. It wouldn’t hurt, and Crowley, it hurts now- but Simon’s fingers are pressed to my neck and I can see him now. I can’t watch his face when I go. I am fighting something strange now, a sensation like falling, a cloudy black around the edges of my consciousness- falling would be as easy as falling into sleep, but my pulse beneath his fingers is there, steady, and there’s a sensation like being on fire that I grab hold of and I won’t fucking let go of it. I won’t let go of you, Snow.

Don’t let go of me. I make terrible choices, but I have to find these kids. I thought I could handle it. I need help. I need to attone for the mistakes of vampires and werewolves- to prevent anyone from turning. And, if they have already turned, they should be taught. Educated. Returned to their families. Give me a chance, Simon Snow. I could be more than a villain. Don't let go of me.


	6. how sweet the sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baz and Simon have to confront their weaknesses as a vampire and a mage without magik.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tw: mention of suicide, Baz angst

Simon 

     Penny’s the one that gets Baz and I back to the apartment. We don’t take the train. She uses magik, and Baz is light in my arms, too light, thin and shivering and more grey than he’s ever been. The apartment feels like an obstacle, and Penny has her hair tied up out of her face, focused and dead serious and I’ve never seen her like this before. “Get him into the bath and get his clothes off,” she tells me, an order, and I’m thankful for it, because I don’t have the strength to make decisions. “Clean out his injuries, I don’t know what werewolves would do to a vampire.”

      I sit him up against the wall, kneeling on the tile floor. Baz is half conscious, half slipping away. He’s shivering. My fingers feel numb, covered in blood when I peel away his clothes, the flimsy material covered in blood and dust and sweat against grey skin. It shouldn’t be like this. The first time I see Baz undressed should be when I’m kissing every inch of him, not when I’m trying to keep him alive. This isn’t how it should go, he shouldn’t be battered and beaten. I remember how strong he was, just last night, how scared he was. Did he look like this? With his eyes half-lidded, using what strength he had to try to pull his knees up and maintain a semblance of dignity- how long had he been there?

       “It’s okay,” I whisper, slipping an arm under his knees and the other around his shoulders. I don’t know what I’m doing. It feels wrong to be in control, it feels wrong to have this much power over him. He’s Baz. He showed up two months late to school one year with a starbucks in one hand and he was still the top of his class. “We need to get you into the bathtub so those don’t get infected. Please, Baz, don’t fight me on this.”

       He doesn’t respond. I don’t think he can. He half-nods, and I lift him, lowering him down into the tub. He falls back along the walls, limp. We don’t have a detachable shower head, so I take a cup from the sink and turn on the bathwater, grabbing towels out of the cabinet.

      I wash my hands and my arms and my face before I fill a cup of water and pour it over his partly healed shoulder. He shudders as the water runs through the cut. I kiss his forehead, filling the cup with water again. “Close your eyes, love, so blood doesn’t run into them,” I tell him. He grabs my wrist, weakly, as I pull my arm back to pour the water over his hair and face. He can’t speak, but I remember. “Whatever you were fighting, Baz, we can fight it tomorrow. You can’t do anything more tonight and- and Penny and I can help you. We can call your aunt or Penny’s parents, too.”

       Maybe I said something right, because he lets go and closes his eyes so that I can finish, keeping still. I use washcloths to wipe at the dried blood and the water runs red into the drain, then pink. When finally the water down the drain is clear, and his injuries are clean and exposed against his skin, I stop.

      He lets me pick him up and bundle him in every clean towel we have, laying on the bathroom floor with his eyes still closed. I want to scream at him, at the world. What is he fighting? Why didn’t he ask for help?

       Instead I am left to wait while Penny finds clothes of mine that will fit Baz. She knocks, as if she wouldn’t walk in on Baz and I naked without blinking- but she knocks because this is more private than that- this is vulnerability, it’s fear. “You can come in,” I call through the door. She opens it with a click and sets down a pile of clothes.

      “I couldn’t tell what sweatshirts were clean so I found a sweater of mine for you.” She stands in the doorway, nervous and staring down at Baz. “There’s some gauze and tape in the cabinets… Simon…” Penny adjusted her spectacles, the way she did sometimes when she was about to tell me something she didn’t want to say.

       During the time I’d been cleaning out Baz’s injuries, she’d changed into purple pyjamas with white spots on the pants, like this is some kind of fucking slumber party- and I realize this is how we live now. We don’t have backup, we’re the adults, we have to fix this. And life goes on even if we’re not ready for it to. She _knows_ we’re going to be awake for the next two days, and I’m only now realizing it. I feel like the class idiot. “Penny?”

     “He’s lost a lot of blood. We can get him to drink some, but he’ll need help eating- so- you’ll have to help him with it, he trusts you more,” Penny began. “He’s a vampire, Simon, not just the rival-turned-lover you think of him. He’s hurt, he’s going to act on instinct. It’ll be even more dangerous than sleeping with him, his instincts will be stronger.” It feels like an accusation, and the hair on the back of my neck tingles. I pull Baz closer to me. I think he’s asleep (he looks so peaceful when he sleeps, as if he’s not injured at all) and I don’t know why I’m not scared of him, but I get the feeling that Penny isn’t, either.

      “Baz would die before he turned either of us, Penny, you know that,” I growl. She nods.

      “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she finishes. “I’d lose you both. Don’t let him near fire.”

 

       I have chills even after she leaves and closes the door behind her. I look down at Baz and kiss him until he wakes up, eyes opening to tiny slits of colour. I kiss him again for good measure. I’ll never grow tired of this- of him, alive, of being able to kiss him and watch his face change when I do. His eyes are pulled at the edges as of by taut wires, an expression I recognize as shame when I pull the towels from his shoulders and legs, reaching for a folded pair of underwear.

     Neither of us says a word. He lets me dress him in long, loose pyjama pants that resemble hospital scrubs, refusing to meet my eye. Don’t let him near fire. Would he? Kill himself at the thought of hurting me? I don’t have to ask to know the answer. I strip off my bloodied clothes and turn on the shower- I don’t want to wait for Penny to get back from wherever she’s gone to find more blood, I don’t want to think about his safety- I need him here with me. I need him to trust me.

       I need him, above everything else, I’m lost in his veins whether he turns me or not.

      The shower courses down my skin and over my hair. I don’t feel the water. There’s a feeling like waiting for a storm to roll in- a dread of inevitable destruction but a sadistic, sardonic thrill that lurks in those dark corners of the mind that someone forgot to dust. It’s an excitement, a hunger for chasing down The Opponent, whoever-whatever- that may be.

      I step out, picking up one of the damp towels to dry myself off. Penny had brought me a cotton grey v-neck softened from wear and flannel pants in the same rust-amber as her sweater, which shrugs over my shoulders and arms like a blanket. Baz watches me in his peripheral vision. I take a package of gauze and a roll of tape from the cabinet. “I’m going to move you to the couch- It’s more comfortable.” I falter. “I won’t drop you. Just trust me.” A breathless, charged second, and he manages a half-nod.

      I take the medical supplies with me and I silently promise him over and over in the short distance to the couch, and I hope he doesn’t notice that I’m promising myself.

 

Baz 

       I fell in love with Simon Snow’s fire before I fell in love with him. He’s lost his magik and his spellfire, but Crowley, his kisses leave trails of stardust over this tired skin.

      Someone has put a white sheet over the couch- I suspect Bunce. My mind flits about like a frightened rabbit, jumping from one thought to another, brought back by Snow’s kisses. He looks like hell. I know I look worse. I’m supposed to be staying calm, but my thoughts are ripped to pieces. There’s kidnapped children who could be werewolves by now, or dead. There’s an ancient hunger boiling under my marred exterior.

      I’m a fucking time bomb. One day I’ll go off, like he used to, only instead of benign blazes I’ll erupt into dissonant distress and leave a bloody trail behind me.

      I fight to keep my eyes open as he tapes gauze patches across my injuries. I’m coming awake- I remember the spell that was cast, and I know why he’s so tired. Bunce poured his energy into me, took strength from him and sent it roaring through my system. It worked- which means that this fool of a mage is as stupidly in love with me as I am with him. Of all people that I could endanger, I’ve chosen the modern equivalent of a fucking soulmate. Damn it. “You shouldn’t…” the words are thick on my tongue when I speak. I grapple with them, force them out. “You’re risking your life, Snow. You should have… le-” I pause to cough, throat dry. “-left me.”

       “You don’t get to decide that,” Simon counters. He stands up, setting the tape and gauze on the coffee table. “Look, I’m not a fucking _victim_ , Baz.” He’s swearing- that’s unusual, but then, it’s unusual for me to be half dead on his couch, too. “I’m the same Simon Snow that went through Watford fighting chimeras and the Humdrum and goblins. I’m the one raised to be the Chosen One. I fought you.” His voice raises, just above speech. “I _killed_ someone. Don’t pretend I didn’t. So stop acting like I’m a sheltered child.”

       I wish I had the strength for all that I would say. I can hear you, Snow, I recognize your words, but I’ll always instinctively protect you. There’s nothing you can do to stop that, my conflagrant love.

 

Simon 

       He doesn’t say anything more, even when Penny comes back. I don’t know if you can exactly prepare blood, but I warm it up anyways and sit next to Baz on the couch with a spoon. Penny stares at me from the kitchen. “Just use a straw, Simon,” she advises, but I shake my head.

      “He spent the worst six weeks of his life drinking blood through a straw. I’m not doing that to him.” I dip the spoon in, and balance my nausea. This is Baz. If I can’t handle him, his diet, his race, his needs- I don’t deserve to be dating him, do I? I have to wait with the spoon at his mouth before he finally accepts that I’m not going to back down.

     “Should I call his family? They can help, too,” Penny offers worriedly. She looks tired, and I realize how much magik she’d been doing, how much energy her spells have been taking. She pushed magik into me, which shouldn’t have worked, but it did. I don’t know the consequences of that, besides my burn. Baz’s eyes fly open with panic, and I shake my head. I don’t need to be telepathic to know his opinion. “Fine, then, fine. I’ll go find pillows. Keep your cross on. I’ll cook something, okay?”      

     I look down at Baz, whose skin takes on more colour with each sip of dark red, and I balance the bowl on my knees so that I have a hand free to run through his hair. His fangs gleam in the light and I don’t know why I’m not scared. Maybe it’s impulse, instinct- his fangs had elongated when he was aroused, too- he wasn’t a creature of malice, his vampiric traits weren’t as linked to destruction as books suggested. I can’t fit all of this love into one version of him. I love him too much for that, so much that it spills over the edges and encompasses everything about him.

 

 


	7. that saved a wretch like me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Penny, Simon and Agatha have to decide what they're going to do- and reflect upon their relationship with magik itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a lot of Agatha POV here, and I hope you read through it before deciding you don't like her!

** Penny **

 

            The first thing I do is call Dad. I don’t usually call him in the middle of the day, but I wait in my bedroom, foot tapping, as the phone rings. I don’t know what I’m doing, but this is my family- and before he even picks up I realize that I’m rushing into danger again, that this is my way of apologizing for something I haven’t yet done. He picks up after the fourth ring. “Is something wrong? I don’t have enough time to help you on your homework-”

            “That’s fine, Dad. I just..” What did I want? I don’t have a question to ask. All I know is that Baz was attached by a werewolf- and that he went after something. He sought out the fight himself. “What do you know about werewolves?” I ask, before I have the time to back out.

            “Werewolves…” he muses, and I can hear the static of his breath over the line. He doesn’t ask as many questions as Mum or Priya, but he answers them, with enough time. “They’re far different from vampires. Dark creatures, less human and more animal in them. They generally turn around the new moon, and they’re vicious when the moon is full. I’ve never had dealings with werewolves in human form, they’re secretive. What’s this about? Research?”

            His concern is clear and I taste bile at the realization that it’s well founded- that I am taking all the risks he doesn’t want me to take. “Research, yes.” Suddenly there’s commotion on the other end and I hear him arguing briefly, the words too muffled to discern. I’m not surprised when Mum takes over the phone, chattering to me about everything from Priya’s study habits to her latest cooking. I don’t have the heart to tell her I’m not listening, I never have. “Mum- Mum,” I interrupt halfway between a speech on dust. “Can you send more towels? Yes, towels. And I have a question.” Merlin, I think my entire childhood consisted of that statement. I always have questions, and I rarely have answers (I just look like I do). “When could you and Dad cast spells based on true love? Did you have to be married?”

            “No, it was a few years after we began dating. I thought you had a long distance relationship,” Mum answers, puzzled. I’m itching to tell her how I pushed magik through Simon, but I don’t. I can’t. “Those spells are highly researched, do you want me to send a book with those towels?”

            “Yes. Baz is staying with us for a few nights and we didn’t pack enough, that’s all. I have to go- tell Priya to do her homework.” I end the call before she has a chance to ask why he’s staying here- Mum can detect lies and I’m too tired to make up a good one.

 

            I text Agatha after that. I shouldn’t, but I do. Agatha can keep secrets and I can depend on her not to rush over here. What’s more, I don’t have many friends, and the other two are injured. Baz needs space when he has to drink in front of us, too- I respect that. We’re scarred from our last fight, but we also grew up forced into a war. The trauma never leaves because every fear is well founded, and anyway, I don’t know what I’d feel without fear. It’s an ice cold lungful of air that I wouldn’t trade for all the warm breath in the world. I’m not a stormchaser, I don’t tag along to watch destruction.

            I know, and fear, that I am the storm. Agatha rejects power- I study it, research it, control it. The Insidious Humdrum would always collapse in on itself- a supernova suicide. It tried to consume the universe. I couldn’t imagine anything other than violent observation. Maybe that’s why I befriended Simon. He shared my obsession, beyond spells. My love of the fabric of magik.

            Agatha represents another life, reminds me of who I am without my books and my spells. How to be a friend, not just an ally or a fighter or a student. She’s good at that.

 

PB [ simon’s in trouble. and not left-the-milk-out trouble, going-to-be-killed-by-werewolves trouble. ]

AW  [ he’s always abt 2 b killed. try scones. ]

PB [ i can’t cook scones well. and i don’t have the energy for spells. ]

AW [ watch breakfast club + lay low idk ]

PB [ breakfast club? ]

AW [ wtf i’ll link u 2 my netflix info u hav 2 watch it ]

PB [ i have to set up a bed on the floor for simon first and i can’t remember a spell for a sleeping bag ]

AW [ u hav no survival skills. fold comforters + blankets up it’s more comfy anyway ]

PB [ usually when baz stays over simon sleeps in his own bed ]

AW [ i don’t want 2 hear abt baz tbh. don’t 4get 2 put fitted sheet arnd the blankets so they won’t move ]

PB [ baz stopped the war, agatha. and anyway you were ready to date him a year ago ]

AW [ wtf did i say abt txting abt that?? u ended the war by killing. i don’t want 2 hear abt death rn. or baz ]

PB [ wait agatha i can’t talk about this to anyone else ]

_*seen 12:04 p.m._

 

            I throw my phone across the room, eyes watering. I have more to focus on than upsetting someone who left me. Damn it. I don’t know why I always expect her to make me feel better- because she’s my friend? Is she that? I need to get out of here. I need to do something, not watch some netflix movie- make the bed for simon, dig the chalkboard out of my closet. Simon and Baz and I are a team, and his fight has to be my fight.

            I text Agatha because I have to. I have to understand her. I know what angered her this time- it’s the death. She’s afraid of death, and Baz is afraid of life, and I don’t know which is worse. I’m caught between. I don’t think she went to California to escape from Watford or magik. I think she craved the light, the natural, sensical progression of life and I don’t. Simon doesn’t. Baz doesn’t. We killed someone. Even by accident, all the light in the world can’t drown out that much dark.

  
  


** Simon **

 

            I wait until Penny comes out of her room to leave it. There’s an unspoken agreement in the air- that Baz won’t be left alone tonight, especially after he finished off the blood and closed his eyes. His eyelids are still trembling, the bowl set aside, and he’s trying not to cry and I can’t do anything but hold his hand until Penny comes in with an armful of blankets and a sour expression. I dart to the bathroom.

 

            I close the door and run the water as if I’m cleaning, but I don’t move until the nausea passes and I don’t feel sick. It’s not Baz, it’s the blood, it’s the copper scent and the memories it triggers. It’s the Mage lying on the ground instead of fighting beside me. It’s Ebb. It’s corpses, and all of the people I trusted dying instead of the ones I didn’t, and it’s a bowl of blood that isn’t even human that he needs to survive.

            I turn off the water and step out of the bathroom. Penny’s made a bed out of blankets beside the couch (she knows I’ll sleep next to Baz, of course she does). I lift the bowl from the coffee table and move it to the counter by the dishwasher, setting the spoon in the sink. “Do you need me to stop by your flat for clothes or are you fine with wearing mine?” I ask as I approach the couch again, sitting at his side. Penny tosses a pillow down by the makeshift bed on the floor, and Baz’s mouth twitches into a crooked, sly smile. His fangs have already receded. “I usually do laundry on this day of the week, or I’d have better fitting clothing.”

            “Oh, I could manage if you didn’t have anything to wear,” Baz drawls, and I’m in too much pain to react to that properly but my cheeks are a darker red than my burnt arm is. The burn doesn’t hurt as much as I expected it would. It’s because Penny held onto my arm that Baz is alive- she was willing to put me in danger to save him. “Ah. I’ve made Bunce uncomfortable.”

            “At least you’re recovering,” Penny concedes. “Mum’s sending towels and books. She’s not sending condoms, so behave yourselves.” She wipes a hand over her face and leaves smudges of dark red that had lingered through her hair. She hasn’t had the time to shower yet. “I’m going to clean myself up and when I come out of that shower we’re going to pull up a plan.”

            “They have kids,” Baz whispers. He repeats it, slightly louder, loud enough to stop Penny and I in our tracks. We don’t breathe. We don’t move. The werewolves have kids? Is this what we’re fighting now? It makes sense, suddenly. Everything makes sense. Baz has a weakness for small children, a deep, dark weakness beyond compassion.

            He was turned when he was a child, watched his mother die. He’d do anything to prevent it from happening to anyone else, let alone littluns. He’d risk everything for that. I meet Penny’s eye, and we nod. I trace the edge of Baz’s cheek, and he turns his head into my hand, and it’s the most natural thing in the world, curling my palm over his jawline. “We’ll figure it out later,” I promise him. Penny disappears into the bathroom, leaving me alone with Baz- I lean over him and kiss him on the forehead, but he hisses in pain. The cross around my neck had brushed against his skin. He tenses when I tuck the pendant underneath my shirt. “I can take care of myself, Baz. You won’t hurt me. As soon as you’re uninjured, we’ll find those kids and bring them home, wherever they are- but we do it the right way. No more keeping secrets from me. No more running off as if I’m some kind of one-night stand.”

            “You’re not,” he interrupts, breaking into a coughing fit. He closes his eyes until he can breathe without rattling. Every time his chest shakes my heart skips two beats. I should be dead by now. He’s going to kill me, this vampire, just not in the way I’d always predicted. “At least… I hope you’re not.”

            “God, Baz, if I didn’t feel like I’d been run over by a truck, I’d have to take another cold shower.” He raises an eyebrow at me, and I must sound like an absolute idiot, sitting on what came close to being his deathbed flirting with him.

            “Didn’t you hear? Vampires are sexy. Now get off, Snow. As much as Bunce would enjoy walking in on you sleeping with me,” Baz sneered, breath labored with the effort of speaking, “She’d prefer it if I were simply sleeping.” I laugh, and he smiles as if he’s won a prize by amusing me. Dork.

  
  


** Agatha **

 

            I don’t respond to Penny. I don’t know how. I ran from her, I ran from everything. Fucked right off, into a world of sunshine and sundresses and spring breaks. I’m on a beach, in a bathing suit, hand wrapped around a lemonade I suspect someone spiked- and she’s fighting god-knows-what, with Simon and Pitch. Magik can drive you mad, it can- Ebb knew that, that’s why she stayed away. She did more good in the world than any mage I’ve met, by helping goats in her weird way. Not changing the world. Just keeping it tidy for the next person.

            So why can’t I? My phone is filling up with texts from Leo, invitations to parties, assignments, a hundred facebook messages and hundreds of normal, everyday events and catastrophes that I can handle. Problems I can solve. In California, I’m no one’s prize, and I’m not expected to give my life away. No one views me as a plaything, an annoyance. The only one who calls me by my last name is my boss, and even he doesn’t sneer when he does.

 

            In the end, I’ll wind up going to London. I’ll step in and play my part and be their missing fucking puzzle piece (no I won’t, I refuse) and I’ll help (they wouldn’t even thank me for it). Why? I trust people. I trust the Mage, up until he tried to kill me. I trusted Simon, and where was he when I walked into a trap? Penny can’t even fold blankets without spells to do it. Werewolves don’t use magik, and neither does Simon, last I heard. Which leaves Penny out of her depth, Baz with the potential to kill her, and Simon wallowing in his inability to use magik, as if it’s the only good thing in the world.

            He loved magik more than he loved me, and I’m going to leave the one piece of safety and happiness I’ve found on this planet in order to save his ass from werewolves. I smash the lemonade bottle into the ground, and a shard lodges itself in the side of my hand. I pull it out and stand up, grabbing my towel and wrapping it around my waist and hand, teeth ground together. Someone will be paid to pick up the glass, and I’m too angry to find empathy for them. I ignore the incoming texts, because the one person I want to reply to won’t understand. This is where I’m supposed to call for help, like last time, and pack up my belongings and go find myself on a full-day economy flight halfway across the world.

            I’ve never been good at doing what I’m supposed to do. I’m not everything that Mum wants me to be, or Simon, or Penny, or anyone in that world- but I’m not all here, either. As I’m walking across the street towards where I’m staying with Phoebe, I nearly get hit by a car because I forgot to look both ways, and my bare feet land on the grit of the pavement, toes grey. I am walking with cold metal steps and a lead heart and I should be dancing in the breeze. I left a part of me in the World of Mages when I left.

 

Damn Penny and damn her text.

Damn Simon for being reckless with other people’s lives.

  
            In the end, I’m damned most of all, for thinking I could leave it all behind. I’m damned because I’m using my savings to fly to London, because they do need me. I’m not going as a mage, to spell away the evil. I’m going as a friend.

 

-

 


	8. before the storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Penny doesn't cope with what she believes is betrayal, and Simon and Baz try to pick themselves up and keep it together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a mildly NSFW scene [mostly fluff]

 

** Simon **

       Baz is asleep by the time the movie starts, and I should be, but- my mind is racing at a crisis pace and Penny’s pouring something in the kitchen and every move sets me on edge. I turn my head from the figures on the screen. Penny’s perched on the counter of the kitchen, a glass in her hand and a dark look in her eyes. The scent is unmistakable- but so is the drilling sound of my heart, tick-tock-tick-tock like a bomb or the pulse of a frightened rabbit. I’ve never seen her drink before. I’ve never seen her drink like this before, as if she intends to ignore the world around her- watch it spin on without blinking an eye. I move to stand up, but she waves me away. “Stay with Pitch,” she mutters, lifting the glass and drinking half of it in one go. I wince automatically, an empathetic response to what must be burning in her throat. “Stay with your bloody boyfriend.”

       “You don’t drink, Penny,” I tell her, but it sounds small- I sound small. A burnt out match. “What’s going on? Is it the kids? We’ll find them, you know we will,” I reassure, but she downs another dose of fermented poison as if she’s taking shots. She had been so optimistic earlier, so filled with energy, that I can’t fathom the change.

       “You know how to pick them, Simon,” she laughed. It’s a dark, coarse sound I never want to hear again. “First Wellbelove, and now a Pitch. There ought to be warnings when you fall in love, worldwide states of emergency declared every time you kiss someone.” I catch the edge in her voice- I’m not entirely oblivious. Somehow, this is about Agatha (I don’t want to think about her, I don’t want to name her, I don’t want to think about her because it hurts and I can’t breathe) and Penny won’t stop until she’s settled it. I’m tangled into this mess again (am I hurt because she betrayed me or because she betrayed magik, I don’t know, I don’t want to find out- the answer might hurt more than the question) whether I want to be or not.

       I look down and run my fingers through Baz’s hair, remembering the way he touched my skin as if he’d never have the chance to do it again. I think of Penny’s insistence that we go after him. I wonder how much she knows. “Baz is nothing like Agatha, Penny. He would never leave, not like she did, not ever,” and I’ve messed it up again because now she’s crying, her hand shaking around that glass. “Werewolves can’t control magik, right?” I ask. I’m in uncharted territory, trying to pull her back into herself.

      “No, they can’t. It didn’t do Baz much good,” she adds. “We’ll be prepared next time.” She keeps glancing at her phone. I pretend I don’t see it. “Did something happen between you and Agatha?” I ask, pulling what I hope is a convincing enough face- it’s obvious something happened, but I can’t just yell at her.

      “No. We didn’t fight. We never fight, actually, she doesn’t like confrontations with the likes of us,” Penny spits. I recoil when she says it, and we’re both silent for a while. I rub my thumb in small circles on Baz’s forehead. “I’m going to go shopping. We need groceries, we need chalk, we need more gauze.” I smile, just slightly, a ghost of a grin. Penny makes plans, she does things- she’s been in and out of this apartment today, frantically, dealing with tiny little crises instead of a big one. She’d changed out of pyjamas and into leggings and another sweater, her hair wet and pulled over one shoulder.

     “Don’t drive,” I advise, and she looks down at the alcohol like she’s forgotten about it. She drinks the rest of her glass before she sets it down, and my heart sinks. “Maybe you shouldn’t go out now,” I try, but it’s a weak attempt. “Just sit down for a minute-”

     “I’m going out,” she repeats. “I’m not going to sleep, anyway. I’ll take my phone. Call me if you need to.” She leaves her car keys on the counter, and takes her card for the tube. I close my eyes and count the little victories. Baz is safe, he’s safe and Penny’s safe- I focus on what makes sense, the feel of his kiss, the sharp curves of his frame, the power rushing through his veins. I’m going to fix this. I’m going to make this work, no matter what steps into my path.

 

[following morning]

 

**Baz**

       I wake up to the smell of his shampoo and the touch of his hand against my chest. The curtains, though pulled, can't mask the sunlight streaming across the living room, dancing sunbeams bright enough to touch. The lights are still off, but the room's light enough with the sun- I hear Bunce in the back room, asleep, see the alcohol on the counter and put pieces together, assembling the riddle. The bandages around my side are fresh and untainted with blood, the clinging clinical atmosphere of disinfectant and antibiotic cream blending with the white tones of the walls, my vision drowsy and adjusting. The inferno in my side has been replaced by a sting, and for the second morning in a row, I don't want to move. Snow is asleep on the floor, curled up on the bed Penny had pulled together. His moles and freckles stand out, markers on a map I've spent so long exploring. Regretfully, he's wearing pyjamas, but I'm content to watch the sun play across his cheeks. It isn't until his face twists in an expression of pain that I move.   

      Snow's always had nightmares, and I've always watched them or woken him, ever since first year- before I knew I'd fallen in love, before I'd known what homosexuality was- and it doesn't feel right to see it happen now. With a cringe of pain, I turn and lower my right hand, hesitating an inch from his skin. I have to remind myself that I'm allowed to touch him like this, unprompted. I exhale slowly and draw my hand over his jaw and down to his shoulder, reeling him back to me, tapping out symphonies on his cheek and neck and shoulder because I don't dare shake him. His panicked look is replaced with each tap by confusion, blinking awake. A ray of sun peeks from the corner of the curtains and illuminates his face- he stretches like a cat, hands over his head and spine arched, before rolling into sitting up, rubbing his eyes. "...Baz? Baz! How long have you been awake?" 

     "Long enough," I reply, just to toy with him, make him think I've been awake for hours. I flick a piece of golden hair over his eyes while he's kneeling next to me. A second later, my self control crumbles under the force of impulse; I pull his hair out of the way to kiss him. There's something logical in my mind telling me we have to talk, but logic didn't taste as sweet as he did and I deserve this, I fucking deserve a break from the whole bloody world.   
  
  
 **Simon**  
  
    Alive. Alive, alive, alive, alive, his cheeks flushed, his kiss is sweet but turns into something more insistent. I don't remember the nightmare, but I feel the sweat trickling down my shivering spine turning innocence dark and corrupt. Penny dove into a liquor bottle when she confronted risk but I'm diving into a different drug, down and down the rabbit hole with every time I kiss Baz's neck to hear the way his breath hitches. His hand lets go of my hair to run up and down my side, leaving firefly trails of dust in the beams of light, playing with the cotton of my shirt, strumming on my violin nerve endings in this disheveled concert hall.   
  
 **Baz**

    He's impossibly soft. 

    He's soft in a way that can't be touched, too soft to be hardened or sharpened or to gleam in an alleyway. 

    They trained him to be a weapon, but Crowley, he could disarm an entire fleet with a glance. 

    I can't keep my hands off of him, and I ought to- my shoulder is burning again, and I have to let it rest at my side, allowing my one good hand to slip over his back and under his shirt, measuring the grooves in his spine. He sits back on my thighs, my hand still under his shirt. "We should stop," he says, worried. What does he think I'm going to do, agree and play the perfect blushing virgin until I'm healed? I don't grace that with a response, but my hand dips lower, and he bites his lip nervously. "You're going to reopen your side," he continued. 

    "You'll have to be gentle," I prompt. He braces himself against the couch so that he doesn't risk falling on top of me and I laugh against his shoulder when he kisses me. He startles when I pull his arse down and our hips collide, and I watch his pupils dilate with smug satisfaction- I have more influence over Simon Snow than anyone else in the magikal community, although I don't think that when Fiona originally told me to defeat the Chosen One, she meant this. I don't think I ever expected this. My head spins under the weight of the work that has to be done, where I've been and where I'm going and I move my hand from beneath his clothes and grip his shoulder instead, an anchor, and for once the oblivious idiot understands what I can't say aloud and he shifts his knee between my legs, movements fumbling and hesitant- we're new at this, too, kids messing about- for once I feel my age, all out of control hormones and inexperienced need. 

    I look away when the tips of my fangs are visible, heartbeat out of sync, breathing knocked off kilter. "Don't, Baz. I choose you, too, all of you," and I'm not going to cry, damn it, I won't give him the satisfaction of knowing just how fragile I am. I release his shoulder, push the hair out of his eyes and I'm lost in the cerulean mist. It isn't at all like it was the last time, it's softer and quieter and instead of crying out, when the pressure builds and I'm thrown off the edge of his kisses, I forget how to breathe, muscles releasing tension I hadn't realized they'd had.   
  
 **Simon**  
  
   Baz doesn't ignore me when I help him into new clothes this time. He tries to tighten the waistband of the sweatpants he's borrowing on his own but he can't tie the knot one-handed, and I change while he forms a grip on his wand. "Bunny ears," he mutters at the general direction of the strings, and they loop into a bow of sorts, but I tighten it without commenting. 

    "I should wake Penny up," I mumble. Baz shifts himself to the side and I find room to curl up on the couch around him, wrapping my legs around his and resting my head over one of the few uninjured patches on his chest. I make no move to approach Penny's door, however- I don't even know what time she came home last night. There's a feeling like comfortable apathy settling around me- an odd, fuzzy emotion I recognize from the last time I'd slept with Baz. I curl tighter into his side. He doesn't complain. "Did they know anything about the kids- the werewolves who did this to you?" I ask, hoping he's calmed down by now. 

    He's on the edge of falling asleep again. I touch the gauze patch over his shoulder, absentmindedly afraid, afraid of nothing in particular. I've lost my magik, but I can still feel it in its own way- a ghost pain of sorts. I was a hurricane and I've been trapped in a bottle now, biding my time. I can hear Baz's heart rate pick up at the mention of the werewolves, and I swear to god this glass bottle can't hold me in for very long. "They told me not to meddle," he whispers, swallowing. "That I'd get myself killed." 

    "Self-fulfilling prophecy," I comment. He raises an eyebrow, and I find myself offended. "I'm not stupid, despite popular belief. I don't need to be a top student to make sophisticated jokes." 

    "You found that sophisticated?" he quips. I wrinkle my nose in response. It backfires on me- his kisses the tip of my nose. "Don't wake her up. Bunce with a hangover is likely capable of bloody homicide. No, the pack I spoke with will clear out of that location to save their hides. I'm back to square one. I need to check missing persons' reports around here for any new victims, though." 

    "We'll help you with that," I promise. "Penny said she went grocery shopping, I'll go see if she picked up any coffee." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [sorry that this chapter was short! i've been alternating a bit with plot and fluff, let me know if the pace is too slow]


	9. i am my sister's keeper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baz gets a phone call. 
> 
> Everything changes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw- mention of suicide.   
> also, this is a terribly written chapter and i'm quite sorry. it's been a long few weeks.

**Baz**

 

            Bunce stumbles in with her forehead wrinkled, like laundry that hasn’t been properly dried. She looks like death. I almost pity her, but she smells faintly of alcohol and city smog, so she’s been out late. I can’t say I blame her- but I can be disappointed. This is Penelope. She’s meant to have her life together, between the american and her intelligence, channeled into simultaneously mundane and brilliant work. Instead, she’s a tired girl with a hangover. Simon gives her a cup of coffee, and she drains it faster than I could drain a rat when I was a kid. “You already changed. Please tell me you haven’t been snogging.”

            I respond with a smirk, and Penny wrinkles her nose in disgust. I don’t take offense. I don’t think I’m physically capable of taking it negatively- because he’s in my veins and I’m still grateful in a way that Snow ever did snog me, that he ever would again. I want to shake my fifth-year self and tell him it’ll be okay. I want to go back and shake him. Fifth year was fear and blood and lust and fear of the bloodlust. And Simon, leaning against a whiteboard that they’d dragged in front of the wall and television, smells different. My nose wrinkles. It smells like fire. It smells like cinders, and it has a raw taste, enough to tell me that something changed. He smells of magik, and I don’t voice it because I’m too scared of what would happen to him if I’m wrong. Watching his heart break all over again.

           All three of us jump when the phone rings. It’s a high-pitched default ring, going off for several minutes before I realize it’s Penelope’s and she’d ignoring it. “Oh, pick it up, Bunce,” I snap, irate. Her petty feuds are causing noise to erupt and with her headache, I don’t even know how she’s standing it.

          Penelope picks up the phone, glaring at me as if it’s my fault that everything’s going to shit. Her expression changes so suddenly I sit up, ignoring a stab of pain- the healing spells hadn’t been enough. Wordlessly- which is unusual, for her- she hands me her mobile. I take it gingerly and hold it up to my ear. “Basil?” a voice asks on the other end of the phone. It’s Fiona. Crowley, and she sounds devastated. I bite my lip, blood trickling down the edge- my fangs are poking through, I’ve a voracious appetite when I’m injured- “You weren’t answering your phone, we thought you’d been taken, too.”

         “I left it somewhere,” I say. “What’s going on, Fiona? I don’t have time for the lot of my father’s-”

         “Mordelia’s gone.”

        “What?”

        “Your sister’s gone. Christ, Basil, come home and help look for her.” Fiona starts speaking about search parties and the Coven and all I can picture is the last time I spoke with Mordelia- we were arguing, I remember, and I don’t even know what we were arguing about. Some stupid shit, probably, it’s inconsequential now. Everything is inconsequential now. “Are you listening to me?”

        “I have to go. I can’t come home, the Coven doesn’t need me there. I’ll look for her here-”

       “Basilton fucking Pitch, if you-”

         I hang up on her. I have to. I throw the phone at Penelope and launch myself off of the couch, which doesn’t work- I fall back onto it, swallowing hard. My mouth is bleeding. It tastes like metal. “Bunce, call your family and tell them to protect your siblings. At all costs. Immediately.” I cover my mouth with my hand, because my rage is trying to escape out of every pore of my skin and my fangs are poking through my lower lip. I’m going to find my baby sister, and then I am going to kill whoever dared take her from me.

         I pray I’m not too late. Would Mordelia lose her magik, if she Turned? Would I have to teach my eight-year-old sister how to hunt in the woods for game? Pry her away from flames when she, too, wants to kill herself?

  
  


**Agatha**

 

         I knock. They open the door. There's no spells, no magikal doorknob. I just come in, as if- as if I was always welcome. 

 

         I am not who they expected (were they expecting someone?). I stand in the doorway with my vintage suitcase, disheveled from getting on the first flight out and having to get a genius in one of the fraternities I know to track Penelope’s phone- it’s the only address I had. I pull my hair back and push past Simon, running my eyes over every piece of the apartment. It’s a mage’s apartment, of course. Books stacked everywhere, as if the whole place was a librarian’s cottage instead of an apartment.

        “You look terrible,” I say, and it doesn’t matter who I say it to. They all look like crap. Baz is half torn apart and his shirt’s off (Christ, are those his fangs?), Simon and Penelope haven’t slept- Penelope’s- “Are you hungover?”

         “You don’t have any right to judge me,” Penny snarls. I recoil, anger boiling in my ribcage. I’ve thrown myself into her world again, filled with blood and death and sacrifice, horrible things that have interrupted my sunny California schooling- for what? For her. For some reason unknown to me, I would still cross an ocean for her. I leave my suitcase by the door and close the door, hoping they won’t throw me out- I don’t have enough money to support a hotel, especially not this close to London. “I need to make a call,” Penny mutters, hopping down off of the counter and withdrawing. She slams the door behind her. Simon and I both flinch.

       “They took Baz’s sister, and we’re going to get her back. Can we trust you?” Simon asks, like he’s asking me what breakfast cereal I like. I gave up Normal when I crossed this threshold. “It’s werewolves.”

 

      I take a deep breath. I’m Agatha Wellbelove. I keep my shit together, that’s what I’m known for, that’s my reputation- cool in a crisis. If only those Californian idiots (listen to me, I sound like Penny) knew what happened that Christmas. Baz is scrutinizing me, and Simon’s arm snakes around his shoulders protectively, kissing the top of his head. Of course.

 

       Everything is starting to make sense.

  
  


**Simon**

 

         I can’t imagine what Baz is feeling, because I’ve never had any siblings- but I curl instinctively around him and kiss the top of his head and his forehead, at the point of his widow’s peak, to remind him that I’m here. He lifts his chin, leaning into my touch like a cat leans into a stroking hand. My wings are bound gently to my back, but they unfurl, just slightly, Agatha making no comment towards the bizarre scene but rather regarding us all as if we’re interesting beetles under a microscope. “You’re pale,” I tell Baz, and he squints.

        “I’m a fucking vampire, Snow,” he responds, in a pained voice, with a glance towards Agatha. I don’t care. For once, I don’t care what she thinks. Baz is at my fingertips, and his bandages are crimson again, his voice soft. He’s as fragile as a bird, but he could knock me back with a single spell. The air in the room is charged with tension. I kiss him again. Penny thinks I’m obsessed- I’m beginning to admit that she’s right (I don’t care. I know she’s right).  

        “No, you’re paler than usual.”

       “I’m an injured vampire, Snow,” he snaps. On a hunch, I leave him on the couch and make my way towards the fridge, opening it to take out a container that has been marked BLOOD in drunk handwriting with a permanent marker. The permanent marker is left in the fridge beside it. I pour it into a bowl just as Agatha pops the cap of a dry-erase marker, turns to the whiteboard.

        “Okay,” she begins, forging on in spite of the madness of the apartment, “What do we already know?”


	10. tyger, tyger, burning bright

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A storm hits, both literally and figuratively.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW; suicide attempt

Simon

 

      We know fuck all. 

 

Baz

 

      I have never felt as terrified as I do after that phone call. This is my sister I’m tasked with finding, and I can barely walk. I can’t stop talking to Agatha, and she only writes down half of what I say in any case. “Silver, Wellbelove. We know how to kill them,” I insist. “They take children on the new moon, and silver kills them.” 

        “No one’s killing anyone, Baz,” Agatha snaps, and writes in her beautiful script that the werewolves are taking the children at the full moon. The loops are symmetrical, but blurred- or maybe that’s my vision. She keeps casting glances at Penelope’s room, and there’s enough power in those glances to be magikal. “They’re taking Normals and magicians, aren’t they? That doesn’t make sense. What do they want with us- I mean, with Normals?” Ah, yes. She’d been living as a Normal for a while, hadn’t she? “If they’re turning these kids, there’s a motive.” 

         “Werewolves are dark creatures,” Penelope cuts in. “It’s probably just a morbid game to them, they hate us. They even hate other dark creatures.” She ignores the other girl completely. “Baz, do you know any other places that the werewolves are using as dens? Our first priority should be your sister.” 

        “My research is at my flat,” I growl, and clench my fists. I can’t get to my apartment from here, I’d collapse. I’m incapable of even doing that, fetching my maps and my notes- “Both of you, go. And sort out whatever the fuck is wrong with you, too, we don’t have time for it.” We don’t have time for anything. We’re running out, and is the room running out of air? There’s a crack at the window- lightning? A thunderstorm? Fuck, how long since I’ve checked the weather? I hear the microwave beep and get up, reaching it before Snow can. It hurts like living hell, but I’m not a child. I refuse to be treated as one. Rather than pour it into a bowl, I let my fangs pierce the bag and drain it, insatiably thirsty. Aleister Crowley, I’ve never felt more dark than today. It scares me. 

 

Penny

 

        I don’t even look at Agatha the entire way to Baz’s apartment, even after the downpour soaks me and she’s holding an umbrella. I’m glad she’s come, but- she just doesn’t seem to care. Nothing gets to her, she just keeps being beautiful and Normal and carefree. Meanwhile, I’m taking the steps two at a time- I’ve never seen his apartment. 

        I produce a hairpin from the depths of my hair and pick all three locks (Morgana, Baz, it’s an apartment, not a vault) and ease the door open, flicking on the lights. The apartment is spotless, the kind of apartment that makes you want to take off your shoes as you enter. He’d cleaned before he’d left- but the desk is littered with papers and books, maps marked precisely with a red sharpie. He had circled the station we’d found him at twice. I trace the lines, because suddenly his decision is real to me, his choice not to trust us- and Agatha doesn’t trust us, either- and I wonder what I’ve done. 

 

Simon

 

         I can’t calm Baz down. The thunder rolling overhead is a drumbeat rolled out like a funeral march, each lightning strike illuminating shadows on his face that scare me. There’s a hunger in his eyes, a darkness illuminated by the storm that’s catastrophic against pale skin and bandages that are crimson again. Werewolf injuries don’t heal easily. “Baz, sit down- For Christ’s sake, please, just- rest for a minute, you’re- you’re-” I’m stuttering again. It comes back- my speech problem- when I’m this worked up. It was the worst part of my first year at Watford. “Please.” 

        “Mordelia’s going to be fucking killed! Crowley, Snow, what would you know?” His words are thorns I can’t shake off- I don’t have a family to speak of, I don’t know anyone like Baz knows Mordelia. I try to move towards him, but he backs away from me. “The Mage isn’t going to dig you out from this one!”

         “She’s not going to die!” I just want him to stop talking like this. Cacaphonic arguments in a room that smells of blood and alcohol, the warmth that had been there at night now gone in the morning. The sky is black, his eyes look black in the hyper-lit lightning flashes. “At worst, she’ll Turn!” 

         “Good enough!” he roars in response to that, catching me off guard. I feel cold and hot, truly terrified, like I was bent over his bleeding body in the Tube. His breath is uneven, and his pupils are dilated, his eyes are eclipsed. He’s furious, but not at the werewolves- he’s injuring himself, aggravating his injuries every time he paced around the kitchen. I jump back when he whirls on a cabinet and slams his fist into it, the wood shattering. He just keeps pacing, but there’s a shard of wood in his palm- he doesn’t notice. “Werewolf, vampire, it doesn’t bloody matter! Everyone wants us dead!  _ I want us dead! _ ” 

 

Baz

 

         Mordelia is my only sister, my own little puff- someone to care for, to watch over. It was my actions that caused this, it’s my fault, and the guilt is a rancid smog that suffocated and turns my stomach inside out. I throw up in the sink, and it’s full of blood. I cough, breathing is hard now- I wipe my mouth on a tissue and toss it in the bin. When Snow tries to come near me, I back away. I don’t want him near me. I can’t. He’s standing there by the window now, the storm a backdrop to those blue eyes and blonde curls. I can’t touch him. I was a fool to think I deserved that. 

         Mordelia is gone because I couldn’t resist the chase. Was it ever me, or was it the vampire, using the missing kids as an excuse to go on a power trip? I’m as dark as a werewolf is, but because I’m a bloody Pitch I’m entitled to magick and life. Mordelia, I’ve failed as a brother- for that I’m sorry. Snow will find you. He’ll keep you safe. Mordelia likes Snow- everyone does. 

        I knot my hands in my hair. “Baz, talk to me. Come on, talk to me, tell me what to do,” Snow tries, and I flinch away- and then the lights are flickering and my chest tightens. I cough again, breath uneven. She’s going to be Turned. They took her, because no one was there to protect her as my mother did for me. My mother. She would know what to do- she already did know what to do. 

        I draw my wand. My hands are shaking.

 

Simon

 

         All of Penny’s spells can’t put my heart back together when I see that look on his face. Nothing has scared me more. Not the dragon, not the Tube. It’s Baz, losing control, but instead of exploding outward he’s collapsing inward, a dying star, and I can’t handle this no no no no no-

        “Baz, give me your wand,” I say, keeping my voice even, calm. I stretch out a hand, and I’m shaking. “Don’t think. You don’t have to think about anything else. Just give me your wand.” I don’t know if this will work. I don’t know how to stop this, how to fix him. I want to shake him and kiss every inch of him and tell him that none of this is his fault, that we’re going to save his sister, save them all. I want him to listen to me. I want him safe. “Baz, we can fix this. We can fix this, I promise, but I need your help. Please.” I force myself to meet his eyes. It’s like looking directly into the sun. It hurts. It burns. He’s terrified, but he’s not scared of the same thing I am. He’s scared of what I’m asking for. “Just hand me the wand.” 

        He hesitates, and raises his wand. For a second I wildly try to remember if we bought another fire extinguisher, but it wouldn’t be fast enough, he’s flash paper. “Simon,” he whispers, and then he lowers his wand into my hand. I shove it in my pocket and I catch him before he falls, lowering him to the floor, praying to any deity that will listen that Penny and Agatha come home within the hour. I kiss his forehead, his cheeks, and then his lips. I don’t mind that there’s blood on his lower lip, I just keep kissing him, as if he’s eaten a poison apple instead of losing his grip on life. Baz’s breath evens out and the red rose on his bandages stops spreading, and I still don’t let go. I’m not ever, ever letting go. 

 

Baz

  
        Snow tastes like fire and water and storms, and I find it so easy to fall into his promises, to try to forget how close I came, how bad it’s become. I tell myself I’m giving it one more chance, because that’s what I said three chances ago, because that’s the easiest way to move on when your entire life is an apology for your species. I focus on the one thing I can count on- blue eyes. Golden curls. That I’m hopelessly in love with Simon Snow, and that I am not going to fight on my own. My hands don’t shake so much now that the threat is gone, the temptation is gone- Snow still has my wand, and I have the feeling he’s not giving it back. I don’t care. I’ll rescue Mordelia with my bare hands if I have to. If we all make it that far. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next chapter will include much more fluff and such! i'm also considering introducing a mordelia POV!


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